Mama and Daddy

Mama and Daddy

Mama was born in 1934 on a farm in Rockingham County. A child of the Great Depression and being raised on a farm produced a certain approach to life's decisions. She saves everything, including money. I grew up with her saying things like "it's the Scot in me" -as if all people from Scotland were misers. I am not sure about the truth in that, but it is so ingrained in my thought processes I find myself defining financial decisions that way.
My mother, to this day, can make something useful out of absolutely nothing. She kept a garden, canned, made our clothes, and saved practically everything. I didn't know until I was older what she sacrificed for us, and how she arranged, and re-arranged everything so we could have what we needed, and sometimes a little of what we wanted.
She had a blossoming career at Duke, working with the Army Research Office at Duke, and leading up their S.O.P with a group at the Pentagon, she commuted to D.C. during the week in the late 1950's.
At a time when most women would be found in the kitchen, the country club, or perhaps on a tour of our nation's Capitol, my mother was flying to D.C. three times a week for her job and rubbing elbows with some pretty powerful people. She gave this up, for us.
In today's world, with people so focused on personal achievement in the public view, I doubt my girlfriends would do the same.

Most ofwhat I know about hard work and education comes from my parents. I guess that this is common for many grown-ups today - for good or not. I don't ever remember reading anything about a 'Protestant Work Ethic' in any K-12 materials, or even discussing it in class. It was just there, in my house, in my neighborhood, and in my church. It would first appear in print to me at age 30, while I was getting a degree in history studying 'the new england agrarian protestants'.
I understood it easily, while my traditional aged classmates had a harder time, and seemed to think it obsolete.


Daddy was born on October 29th, 1929; the day the Stock market crashed. He is only 5 years older than Mama, but a world away in who he is. His father was butcher and grocer. Still a hard job, especially during the Depression.
Grandaddy and Grandmother believed in having a good time. By this, I mean to say that they closed shop at 8, had supper at ten and then went out to play cards and have drinks. They slept until 9 or 10 in the morning and opened up the store after breakfast. Maybe it was coming of age at the end of World War I, or building a business in the 'Roaring Twenties' that made them live in the moment as they did.
Daddy left when I was nine and moved to Chapel Hill. and I learned how to bartend in my father's house long before I was of age to drink; at our house my mother might, reiterate might, drink half of an ice cold beer on a really hot summer day if she had been working in the garden.

What that life produced in my father, an only child, was to seek enjoyment and pleasure and good times. He worked, but that has never been what drives him or inspires him. He loves art, music, philosophy, and especially films. He shared his love for cinema with me, and instilled a knowledge of and appreciation for the arts that continues to shape my views.
When I was eight, a branch of the public library opened in our neighborhood. It quickly became my haunt. On Monday nights, Daddy took me to watch the free movies they showed. It was here that I was introduced to films such as "Gunga Din", "Anna Karenina", "Dr. Zhivago", and "The Man Who Would Be King". I think that I was the only child there, and each viewing was followed by a discussion about the film's characters and genre and tone. I soaked it in, the reverence for the art form, the analytical approach, and the depth of the characters and their dilemmas; all enveloped in the time with my father.

I was lucky in many ways being their youngest child. The way they raised me was different than how they raised my older brother and sister. I imagine what they, and I, would call 'trial and error' was minimized by what they learned with their first two children, and with their own personal growth and maturity as adults. It took me a long time to understand why my siblings relationships with both of our parents is so different than mine. My brother, as first born, now has no relationship with my father, and my sister has only a begrudging one at the insistence of her husband for the benefit of their children.
By the time I arrived and became my own little entity, my father had matured. He was not the angry, rash, erratic man that he had been in their childhood.